[A.J.Armitage]

I admit this is another peeve of mine, but Hayek did not call himself a "libertarian" in that essay, as Nick gamely suggests. In fact, he explicitly rejected the label, calling it "singularly unattractive."

But of course his actual words are in this thread, and he absolutely did not reject libertarianism, the thing. He rejected "libertarianism", the word. He wanted the thing to be called something else.

[Roscoe]

he absolutely did not reject libertarianism

"For Hayek, like Burke, believed that the institutions of freedom he cherished emerged from an undesigned and spontaneous evolutionary process utterly dependent upon the distilled knowledge embedded within inherited traditions and institutions. He was captivated by the wondrous order-within-complexity generated by this suprarational social process and wished to defend it against that rationalistic mentality which refuses to comprehend the significance of tradition and custom."